It’s funny (at least for me) how these things work out: up until yesterday I could not see many uses for Apple products apart from glossy displays at rather high prices… and lying down on my own couch and psychoanalysing myself, I guess my problems may go a bit deeper 😉

Today, however, I was shown the error of some of my ways. I went to an Apple training session, spent a good half day on a MacBook creating progressively complex podcasts in GarageBand, working with iTunes to add metadata, uploading these podcast episodes to a blog, subscribing to them on my Nokia N900, then doing more complex things with iMovie and having a chat about PodcastProducer. So quite a few things.

To start with, Apple’s philosophy kicked in again: ‘we’re not going to let you maximise a window, we’ll only increase its size as much as we think it needs to display properly’… Grrr…. Typical… However, seeing how all the applications I used: GarageBand, iMovie, iPhoto, Keynote and Pages work with each other – and they really seemed to me to be working well with each other – made me sit up and pay attention.

Text-to-speech output was good enough at first sight and the possibility of creating multimedia e-books was really cool: embedding videos in your book and being able to play them in full screen (the same applies for images) was definitely a great feature.

Now, not everything I’d produced worked back on my N900 – in fact, apart from the plain audio podcast, and the second page of my e-book, my apps refused to do anything useful with my Apple … fruits. However, it was very interesting how streamlined, interoperative and slick some app suites can be. Combine that with the fact that, in theory, you could have a MacBookPro boot to Linux, too, as well as run Windows on VMWare (btw, does anyone out there actually do all that?), you’d have a pretty cool all-in-one machine.

Now: will that make me throw my Win 7 tablet and get a MacBook along with the groovy bunch of designers and creatives and the mass of others who’re not, but would like to be hanging out with the cool kids? Not yet, I’m afraid. I still love my tablet, I’m not THAT insecure 🙂 and I’m certainly not paying almost double for a MacBook.